London 2012 organisers are considering giving away tickets for football matches at Hampden Park to schoolchildren amid fears that they won't sell out.

With more than 1m tickets remaining unsold for the football tournament, and with Glasgow's matches the slowest sellers, it is believed tens of thousands of tickets may be distributed to schools. The cost of the tickets would be subsidised by sponsors.

Organisers are keen to avoid the swaths of empty seats that formed the backdrop to some of the action in Beijing and are developing backup plans in case the tickets fail to sell.

The tickets would be channelled through the existing Ticketshare scheme, through which sponsors are already paying for some tickets to be distributed to schools. About 100,000 tickets have already been distributed in this way.

Football tickets were always expected to be the hardest to sell, particularly for those matches not involving the British side, and they account for more than half of the 2m unsold tickets for the Games.

Tickets to many matches are expected to remain on sale right up until the day of the game.

Locog, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, also yesterday released 30,000 tickets in hospitality areas of the O2, which will host gymnastics and basketball and be renamed the North Greenwich Arena during the Games. Priced at £20 and £50, they were part of a new batch of 50,000 contingency tickets that were put on sale across a range of sports.